| Christmas Meme |
[Dec. 7th, 2009|10:46 am] |
On the twelfth day of Christmas,  madaline_mcbain sent to me... Twelve gillacatans drumming Eleven fadingmemories piping Ten pirates a-leaping Nine tattoos dancing Eight zombies a-milking Seven icons a-wrestling Six wristcutters a-clubing Five cho-o-o-obits Four weird toys Three kingdom hearts Two swatch dogs ...and a bateman in a rockabilly. |
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| Decisions, Decisions... |
[Dec. 6th, 2009|02:41 am] |
Of the things to have to decide, I am trying to make decisions. What I am not happy about is my mother already starting to pressure me about dresses and what not AND inviting family members who i don't know. We know the best man (Kenny Campbell), and I think i've narrowed down who might be the maid of honor. Guess we'll see, i wanna have this decision made by my birthday...
There's a lot of stuff to plan. Maybe I should just do the Vegas wedding. |
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| Another step forward |
[Dec. 2nd, 2009|11:54 am] |
This weekend I took the plunge and signed up for my first Jiu Jitsu class. This one, again, being taught by Graciela. I also signed up for another kickboxing class. I can say, I'm pretty damn excited. I'm hesitant about somethings, mostly the way I set it up. First kickboxing in the morning, immediately followed by Jiu Jitsu. We get maybe 20 min break between. I know, I'm going to be sore for the first two weeks, just like when I started kickboxing, maybe even worse. What I am glad for is that Cody will be there with me. This means he can learn kickboxing and wont have to take the second hand teaching from Graciela to me to him.
Also, I'm looking into taking classes for Thai Boxing and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Thai boxing because they show you how to throw knees and other techniques that haven't been taught to me from Graciela (yet) and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu because it promises to dramatically improve your body within 6 months through body weight work outs. If for nothing else I might only take the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu one for it's conditioning aspects. But we'll see, it might be a little ambitious to take along side 2 other classes, then again, it's only for 6 months.
Guess we'll see when we go visit the studio. Also depends on how much they charge. May just stick with Graciela, it's nice having a female instructor that can whomp some serious ass and is a world champ. |
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| Sermons |
[Dec. 2nd, 2009|01:30 pm] |
This just popped into my head:
Many years ago I was listening to a sermon. The priest held up two pieces of paper. "What makes this one worth five pounds, and this one not?"
(I don't know what his text was; something like Ps.145:13, perhaps.)
The same man kept calling out:
"It doesn't have the watermark."
"It doesn't have the hologram."
"It doesn't have the silver strip down the middle."
Eventually, the priest peered down at him and boomed, "Are you an expert forger, sir?" |
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| Talkers |
[Dec. 2nd, 2009|08:26 am] |
So suppose there was a spod client for the N900. Suppose it had a dialogue at the start to pick a talker. Which talkers should it come preloaded with?
(Snowplains, obviously; what else is still around?) |
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| That awkward age. |
[Dec. 1st, 2009|07:59 am] |
When I go to a movie theater, I always give the person sitting next to me the opportunity to claim the armrest. If they're not interested, I will discreetly place the corner of my elbow on it and judge their reaction. If they don't object to that, I will then prop my entire forearm on the armrest and maybe start leaning on it a little. As the movie progresses and as long as the other person doesn't oppose my advances, I will continue to encroach and gradually establish more territory for myself. This happens almost unconsciously. In fact, if I'm not careful, by then end of the movie I could be sitting in their lap, eating their popcorn. It's really embarrassing.
I think it would be fun if people developed superpowers based on how they behaved as kids. For example, if someone was really quiet and often went unnoticed, they would eventually become invisible in peripheral vision. ("Sorry, kid. I didn't see you there." "No. You didn't.") Or if they were really stubborn, they could turn themselves into a statue, like in Super Mario Bros. 3. My superpower would be that, without actually gaining mass, my body could take up disproportionate amounts of space, like a psychological force field. My social inelegance already sort of does this and this superpower also goes hand in hand with armrest priority.
My vote for the worst type of mess to clean up goes to raw eggs. Impervious to the absorptive power of paper towels, they don't soak up but just let themselves get pushed around, like lazy Jell-O. You can spatula out the yolk that is floating on the surface of the carpet, but the deep-down layer requires a dedicated pattern of washing, scrubbing, and just getting used that nice, eggy smell. Supposedly, egg yolk is good for a dog's fur, so the best course of action might be to get a dog from the local shelter and return him later, complaining that his coat is too shiny. They'll have to agree.
( Diamond suit from Bag of Bones by Inky-Dinky )
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| New Love: Black Olive Tapenade |
[Nov. 29th, 2009|06:27 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | food | ] |
| [ | Current Angle: |
| |  umami | ] |
Rosemary crostini with black olive tapenade.Or bruschetta. Or Both. I forgot where I tried the black olive tapenade originally, but I loved it. The other day at Fresh N Easy I realized in their pasta section they have a ton of selections of sauces and what not, one of which was this black olive deliciousness. I also found rosemary rolls there, about the size of dinner rolls. Cut them side ways, toaster oven till crisp, and add the olive goodness....YUM!!! I like it, despite knowing it's usually made with anchovy usually. I only can manage to have one roll at a time though, so much flavor, esp when you add bruschetta with it. |
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| Holiday weekend |
[Nov. 29th, 2009|04:11 pm] |
Seems so fucking long!
I haven't eaten like it's the holiday's. Don't get me wrong. I had turkey, mashed potatoes, etc on Thanksgiving but didn't "eat" like it was Thanksgiving. I didn't wanna feel bloated at Perv. I haven't kick boxed in nearly 7 days and I feel so sluggish and useless. Not because of anything mentally but because no the non-activity. I could get outside and kick box with Cody but it's not the same as group environment, and I have to figure out what to do for rounds (make up combination's, drills, etc). Plus, I'm still teaching him. Lastly, he doesn't like getting up and doing physical stuff really.
Drove to Fresno Saturday for a wrestling show. There was snow up in Gormon and the topography reminded me of Colorado. The building where wrestling was held was freezing cold and by the semi-main event I was literally shaking. I had to get up and walk around to create warmth. My feet were so cold they felt wet and I was honestly afraid I might get sick just from being so cold for so long. It happened to me once before. Luckily, today I woke up feeling fine. I did, however, manage to sleep for 11 hours.
Today will be homework. I'm so behind and I don't really care so that makes it worse. I don't need these courses but I still gotta do decently so that will make me work at it. Tonight: In a play God and Satan meet at a restaurant to negotiate the terms of the second coming.God is a female, Satan a male.Comedy will ensue. If it turns out well then I'll post it.
Fin. |
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| Elite on the N900 |
[Nov. 28th, 2009|02:23 am] |
HECK YEAH
IT IS ELITE
ON THE N900
THAT IS ALL |
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| New Year's resolutions |
[Nov. 27th, 2009|01:13 am] |
I didn't make any resolutions for 2009.
I am thinking of what to make for 2010.
I think I will try to write a sonnet every week.
I think I will try to write another children's novel.
I will certainly do my best to get the programming book I'm working on finished.
But perhaps I'm too close up to myself to see with the best resolution. If you could wave a wand and make a resolution that I'd keep-- that is, change something about or for me-- what would it be? Comments are screened, but anonymous ones are fine. Say if you want your comment unscreened. |
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| Perverted Turkey |
[Nov. 26th, 2009|05:26 pm] |
*In the voice of "The Rock"*
Finally.....The RAZE.....will go BACK!...to Perversion!!!!!!
*deep inhale*takes it all in*
.....................
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......
...
*people's elbow* |
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| Making Avaricius and Avalot into free software |
[Nov. 26th, 2009|07:12 pm] |
I am going to contact my parents tomorrow and ask for the source code of Avaricius and Avalot so that I can release them as free software. (It was written in Turbo Pascal.) This may mean finding a way to read 5½" floppies. I wonder if I can just buy a very cheap very old computer and hook it up with a serial cable.
Some of the nifty things about Avaricius and Avalot, just from memory:- Compilation. One of the odd things about Avvy is that only the code was compiled, not the data. The data was a significant part of the whole, and these days I would have created it in some easy-to-edit format and compiled it. But in those days, with a few exceptions, I first designed the binary format in which it would ship, and then wrote an editor for it. So I think, in order to make it at all useful, one of the things I'm going to have to write is a decompiler for all the data formats, so you can read them as XML or something.
- How the images got included. This actually extended to having to write a general image editor "hiz" for Avaricius, because I didn't have any information on the save file format of any image editors I had access to. But for Avalot I wrote a screenshot program and my brother used Dr Genius to edit the images (he drew almost all the images in Avalot, which is good, because the images I drew in Avaricius rather sucked).
- Why EGA? The game required EGA (and used sixteen colours) because we didn't have VGA when coding started. By release time we had VGA, but the only concession to it was to use its ability to redefine colours to make change "bright magenta" to be more Caucasian-flesh-coloured.
- Codename. Avalot was codenamed "Project Minstrel" during development.
- Dogfood. One of the jokes that was so laboured that I never explained it: the minstrel who plays games against you was briefly called "Winalot", because almost all the characters' names ended in -alot; "Winalot" is a brand of dogfood, so he was soon renamed "Dogfood".
- Cameos. Dogfood, Spludwick, and Baron du Lustie were cameo appearances by the development team.
- Beta testing. We had different beta testers complain that both the Dogfood and Jacques puzzles were both incredibly difficult and ridiculously easy.
- Scroll drivers. You could embed ASCII control codes in what was effectively standard output (the "scroll drivers"), which would otherwise have gone into dialogue boxes on the screen, and affect lots of things about the game. Much of the moment-to-moment control of the game happened in this way.
- Wordwrap. The scroll drivers in Avaricius didn't do wordwrap, so I had to do all the wordwrap by hand. Big mistake, rectified in Avalot.
- Bootloaders. "avalot.exe" was merely a bootloader that allocated a few kilobytes of empty memory and ran "avalot9.exe", which was the real program. It pointed one of the user interrupts to the empty memory, and by manipulating this memory the child processes could instruct the bootloader either to load a given other child process after they quit, or to quit itself. This meant that a lot of the cut scenes could be implemented in separate executables. There was also space in the empty memory to store the current game state, so that you could seamlessly return to the game. One of the possible subprocesses was command.com, so that you could shell out to DOS and not have Avvy resident in memory, so there was actually space enough to do something.
- Edna. The save-game format ("edna") had generalised header information which meant that if you attempted to load a file from any other Avvy game, the correct game could be loaded to handle it.
- Chunk. Each room had a set of associated sub-pictures in a format called "chunk" which could be set to display at set intervals, meaning that animations could be put together without changing the code.
- Also. There was a resources format called "also" which allowed you to define things about each room such as where the doors connected to the next room and what direction you'd be walking in when you got there, and it had a set of opcodes which could be made to run a given cut scene, put up a given piece of boilerplate text, etc, when you walked into a given area or touched a line between two given points. Strangely, I never unified these opcodes with the scroll driver control characters.
- Skellern. There was the usual routine which hooked the clock interrupt to slow the game down. Around the time I was writing it I heard a song called Slow Down by Peter Skellern, and the whole subsystem is littered with references to that song. In particular, the slowdown routine couldn't be enabled during debugging, and therefore was disabled during development in general, so there was a standalone terminate-stay-resident utility called "skellern" which stood in for the real thing.
- The onion puzzle. This is the puzzle I'm most proud of. People were still asking how to solve it almost a decade later on Usenet.
- Avalanche. The whole magic opcodes system was going to be generalised in the third game "Avaroid" into an architecture for a virtual machine called "avalanche". I had no idea about virtual machines; I pretty much made up the idea. But the third game never shipped because I went to university.
- Z-machine. I've occasionally thought of doing a Z-machine port, as a plain-text adventure. I've never actually started it, though. I think it would be ineligible for the IFcomp.
I am wondering what else I'll discover when I finally find the source.
Update: I just phoned my parents:- My brother Andrew knows where the disks are and will find them when he comes home for Christmas vacation
- My brother Mark is one of the copyright holders so we have to clear it with him as well, so there's no knowing what'll happen until he decides.
More news as we get it. |
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| Completely irrelevant information |
[Nov. 26th, 2009|06:52 pm] |
You know how sometimes people on your friendslist post about stuff going on in their life, and all of a sudden you think "Wait a minute? Since when were they working THERE? Since when were they dating HIM/HER? Since when???" And then you wonder how you could have missed all that seemingly pretty standard information, but somehow you feel too ashamed to ask for clarification because it seems like info you should already know? It happens to all of us sometimes.
Well, here is some completely irrelevant information about me. Copy it to your own journal if you like, delete my answers, and substitute your own.
1. What toys did you take to bed with you when you were a kid?
A teddy called David, a squirrel called Mrs Squirrel, and a cat called Joanna. I wish I knew where Mrs Squirrel is now. Here is a picture of me with David.
2. What is your favourite colour?
Orange, then black, then green.
3. What was your first experience of computers?
When I was about five, my parents took me along to a computer course they were attending at Hitchin Technical College, for which I will be forever grateful. A short while later, my headmaster bought a BBC Micro for the entire school, and invited me up to his office. "I've noticed", he said, "that your handwriting is the worst in the school. This computer has a thing in it called a wordprocessor that might help you."
4. When you were a kid, who did you want to win the Boat Race?
Cambridge, honestly! It was because they lost about a dozen times in a row and I always cheer for the underdog.
5. What was the title of your first book?
"The Squirrel Army". I was about seven. It was the first of a series of four. I'm sure my mother still has them.
6. What was your favourite Christmas present ever?
This thing. I spent hours solving all the levels. You had to solve ten addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division problems in four different levels within a certain time limit. I loved it.
7. What clubs did you join as a kid?
The Puffin Club; Mensa; the National Association of Gifted Children; the Vegetarian Society.
8. What was your favourite part of Christmas?
I was asked this by a teacher once, and after some thought I said it was Boxing Day, because you had plenty of time to look at all the things people had given you. She stared at me and said "That's rather boring."
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| Burned fingers update |
[Nov. 25th, 2009|12:51 pm] |
| [ | Current Angle: |
| |  relieved | ] |
Throughout yesterday I was keeping my fingers in and out of ice water. I used Elmer's glue at one given point (helps pain & swelling), then Cody brought me burn ointment. Kept doing the ice water thing. And before I went to sleep at night I got some pure aloe gel from my fridge, put some on my finger, then lightly wrapped it. This morning the burn is like 90% better. The spots that were starting to blister have gone down dramatically, the swelling is gone on my ring finger. In fact, the only thing that stayed is the split skin on my pinky knuckle, and a small blister on my ring finger. The 3 fingers are still sensitive to touch but a whole lot better than previously. Yay for Mexican home cures (Elmer's Glue & aloe gel), internet advice (water immersion), & culinary care advice (immediate running water then burn ointment)!
Big exam in philosophical ethics today. Hindu, Buddhist, and Confucian ethics. Ack! This is significantly harder than Western thought. Too many big words. Wish me luck. |
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| I think I need a Business Monday to balance out Casual Friday. |
[Nov. 25th, 2009|10:40 am] |
Ah, house troubles. The kitchen drain was clogged so I tried to fix it by pulling out the U-shaped trap underneath the sink. Of course, the trap was full of water so I looked around for a place to dump it and settled on pouring it down the sink. A few seconds later I noticed the water pooling around my shoes. "Oh, right."
I'm having to bribe my siblings into letting me take some of our precious family heirlooms, like our Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cereal bowls and our set of McDonald's issue Batman Forever collectible glasses. And I've decided that I hate venetian blinds. I feel like Joan Crawford yelling "No venetian blinds, ever!"
I had an odd dream where I was at a theater that was putting on a combination play/movie. There was a movie playing on the screen, but all of the theater employees were also doubling as actors. It took over an hour for the performance to start, so the entire audience was getting agitated and restless, unless some of the more obnoxious audience member were secretly actors too. A placeholder movie started running, but then after a few minutes, it was interrupted by a 'live' news feed. A giant monster was attacking Earth. The monster didn't come from outer space, but had actually been living inside of the Earth, sustaining itself on the chewy molten center, to the extent that the planet was now mostly hollow and falling apart. The whole thing was like a combination of Tremors, Cloverfield, and the episode of Futurama where they find Nibbler. I just can't remember what the monster's name was, but its name translated to [insert weird dream logic] "The Earth Was Good" as in either, the Earth tasted good, or the Earth used to be good, but now it was gone. Eventually, the monster started attacking whatever city we were watching the movie in. It was great because whatever happened on the movie screen affected the audience inside the theater. As the performance went on, the theater employees/actors grew more and more panicked and wouldn't let anyone leave the theater. It got to the point where the building was actually shaking and bits of ceiling were falling down on everyone. Before things got too out of hand I woke up and missed how it all ended.
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| I feel stoopid |
[Nov. 24th, 2009|04:20 pm] |
Hi Mr French - this is Gina Hernandez from your Wednesday Night 7-10pm Ethics class at Oxnard College.
I'm writing to tell you that I ended up doing something really stupid today: I burned a few fingers on my right hand. Where on any given occasion I wouldn't write to tell you this, I am writing you because my right hand is my writing hand - and we have a test tomorrow. I don't know if by tomorrow it will be better or worse but as of right now I can see where blisters are beginning form and one part in my knuckle split the skin. Currently I can write, though it's not as quick or neat as my writing typically is. I was wondering, if it isn't too big of an inconvenience, if during tomorrows exam I might be granted some extra time. If not then I understand. I'd ask to take it the next week but we're so close to the end of the semester I'm not sure that would be wise (much like my oil blunder while sauteing mushrooms).
Thank you for your consideration,
Gina Hernandez
I love having good casual relationships with my professors...
Good idea - making yummy home cooking. Bad idea - burning your fingers to all crikey! Essentially, I was adding mushrooms to a pan with hot olive oil. The first 3 went in fine and when I added the fourth the oil popped big time. I moved back in time and approached the pan to add another mushroom and as I did it popped big again and splashed a lot of oil onto my fingers. Not little pop splashes - those I can handle. This was a mini oil tsunami. I ran cold water over it, did some ice, then did immersion in ice water, all of which probably kept the swelling and most blistering down. But I can see a forming blister on my ring finger, my pinky skin is cracked from being burned, my middle finger got the least, it's just tender. I have burn ointment on it right now and took advil. I've never had a burn hurt so friggin bad before! *waahhh* Nothing really more to do besides suck it up. Hopefully I can do enough magic on it to be better by next Tuesday for kickboxing. |
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